Google Voice

Google Voice at the peak of its adoption did serve as a very real and effective solution. However bugs persisted, and innovation lacked, and support for the product soon declined. However, there are several other solutions provided that focus on making one product as best as it could be. Google made it clear to me as a customer, that this was a backup for a backup. When you look at the simplicity on its own, it appears to be fantastic, however as you dive deeper, and experience its lack of smooth edges, you find that it's been built by engineers who were given a scope, rather than solving for a use case and listening to customer feedback. Many of the other solutions available on the market, see this opportunity. This is why voice communication is a growing SaaS vertical, albeit competitive. Understanding the customer here is key, and Google understands what drives value to the larger organization. As a business owner, I understand, that when a business has to allocate resources, another department, or service suffers. Unfortunately this product feels to be the one that has met that fate.

I chose Google Voice for their seamless integration. Calls and text bundle and email alerts. While Skype had great quality calls a long time ago, I noticed their support team is horrible with many bugs and crashes. The call logs on Skype were not registering and sometimes it goes unresponsive running on the latest version of Windows. In all, Google Voice is much superior.

Google Voice stands far above products like Vonage, RingCentral, and Jive (GoToConnect). It is more mature as a VOIP product and free to home/personal users. For small usage scenarios like ours, Google Voice cannot be beat on price and ease of use. It is very affordable to keep around as a secondary system.

Google Voice is way easier to get going and use. It's cheaper, more robust, and doesn't have any issues with the app not ringing or not transferring calls correctly. Plus, a lot of our employees already have experience using Google Voice with their personal accounts and found the transition to using it at work quite seamless.

Zoom and Slack are the closest comparisons I can come up with, but those are pretty different use cases, at least for us.

The integrations of Google Voice with all our devices are flawless, Android, iOS, Windows, Linux and Mac. Also, the call performance is far superior on wifi as well as on mobile data. With Skype, we had several problems with personal accounts, performance issues, and in general, it felt awkward to use it.

FluentCloud/FluentStream is what we ended up using for our business. It too is easy to use, a little tougher to integrate, but not bad at all, and much cheaper. Does everything I need it to do. I would switch to Google Voice if it was cheaper as I use all the other Google products.

Google Voice is easier to use, but in Skype you can have local numbers in different countries (not only in the US).
Skype call rates are lower than Google Voice's rates for non-US numbers, check the rates according to your predicted usage.

I've used in-house systems at other agencies and they went down all the time, were not reliable and were extremely expensive.

Google Voice is great if you are a one-man business. It allows you to have a business phone number for people to call without having to give your personal cell phone number out to strangers. The cost is very affordable. But as your business grows, you need to look for a better service like Jive. Jive is a very affordable phone service for businesses and offers similar services like Google Voice but on a large scale. Jive still allows you to have transcribed voicemails and you can access it online or on your smartphone.

I have not used any other products like Google Voice.

Google Voice and Dialpad, I believe, are a very equal match, and we chose Google Voice due to only a small amount of interface differences that made a difference in the service's functionality. Also, we had used google voice for a long time before Dialpad, so making the transition was difficult. The main downfall of our using Dialpad was that the text of all of the conversations you had with someone did not pop up automatically when you went to send them a message. What you had sent them before only popped up once you had sent them your message. That is the case unless you look up the person's name and profile and then select to send them a message from there, which works fine and is fast, but not as fast as just clicking the send a message button and typing their name.

Google Voice has the best interface, and is the easiest to use of all the phone services out there. It also is free! We love Google Voice because it gives us a free phone number that many people can use, so my entire team can have one unified number that employees can call and we can have visibility on. It works great on phone and computer as well. It doesn't get glitchy, and links to your other Google apps in Google Drive. Overall, it's our favorite solution for employee solicitation.

I primarily use Google Voice for texting, but I’ve also used EZ Texting for similar purposes. The main difference is that Google Voice excels at individual communications, while EZ Texting is best for mass texts. Google Voice texting does not cost anything, whereas EZ Texting charges per text.

Google Voice is much more cost efficient and doesn't have all the bells and whistles that our small company doesn't need. Google Voice never tries to upsell us and just makes an easy-to-use product that has greatly increased the efficiency of our organization. We aren't constantly bombarded to continue our "subscriptions."

Google Voice performs similar communication activities compared to many other business service tools. However, one often must integrate other Google apps in order to fully experience the benefits that other platforms experience locally. Voice does have the benefit of merging all necessary communication contact numbers into one easy and accessible platform. However, the integrated multichannel experience of other competitors can make Google Voice feel dated in comparison.

Google Voice was a superior product in our opinion to some that we looked at because of its versatility and ease of implementation. Not only were those big determinants in our decision, but the cost-effectiveness of the program played a major role in our decision. Some of the other options we looked at had limited functionality for the cost.

Google has a larger ecosystem.

Google Voice is more reliable than CallHippo and has better call quality. Additionally, Google Voice's integration into Google Hangouts expands it functionality for video calls. Google Voice also provides access into Google's contact directory giving quick access to anyone who already has a phone setup with Google. Google Voice also has a more useful free plan as any user with a phone number can quickly setup their account.

Google Voice is hard to compare because on a cost basis it is so much lower than it's competitors. As a whole, I would say it's definitely lacking features compared to Nextiva, and a few from RingCentral but the service is reliable and it has the most commonly used core features that most small businesses need. If you want or need call center exclusive features, Dialpad is the next runner up here as they have developed more advanced call center style features on the Google Voice cloud stack and integrates with GSuite... but it will cost you more. At this price point, it's hard to beat as it's a solid value and if you're not needing more features it gets the job done. Ultimately I choose Google Voice after using all these other services to save the company money and provide the employees with the essential features they needed with minimal effort as an administrator required to setup new accounts, etc. It also helps the company leverage the services we're already paying for with the GSuite apps, by integrating Google Calendar, Meet, Hangouts, etc. this way we don't have to have a mixture of products in the company requiring extra training thus simplifying the on-boarding process for new employee's.

The price was a huge standout since we have a large number of users and because of this it was important for us. Aside from cost the reliability was also of utmost importance due to the urgent nature of some of the calls. These were the two main reasons we chose this platform.

Google Voice was perfect for the small team setting where we needed to coordinate calls from time to time with urgency and supported call forwarding in a manner consistent with the services we need to provide to our clients.

We have Cisco tools as a primary option for our VoIP needs due to it's more professional approach. However Google Voice has recently became a business level program as well. I'm happy to use it due to it's unique features and the flexibility as we always expect from Google.

Considering that Google Voice integrates well into the other Google services, it has clear benefits when sharing and accessing call information. Skype is always a pain to use for calls b/c, not everyone had it, but Google Voice works with any phone and most people already have a Google account.

We used Vonage as part of our initial process but conference call and app features were farther behind compared to Google Voice. Both products have some advantages over others but, in the end, for better app and global use, Google Voice makes things easy for our organization. It also helps to onboard new users easily compared to Vonage.